Social Media

MyYearbook's Growth, and Some Questions

MyYearbook, essentially Facebook for a younger demographic, is out promoting its growth again: comScore ranks the site ahead of Bebo,Tagged, and Hi5 in the United States, they say (hi5 and Bebo are very big outside the US, so take that with a pinch of salt), while pageviews have increased 500% between February 2007 and today. And while the site was previously heavily reliant on MySpace for traffic (due to a "Quiz" widget on MySpace pages), CEO Geoff Cook says that the quiz is now less than 6% of their traffic. Their "Battles" feature, a widget that puts two photos or videos head to head (viewable here), has driven a lot of the new growth.

MyYearbook's best selling point, however, is it's highly marketable "founded by teens" pitch. Founders Catherine and Dave Cook were age 15 and 16 when the site began, and Catherine, now 17, spoke at the iMeme tech conference on Wednesday about her vision for the site. As you can see from their press page, the youth of the founders has gotten extensive coverage, with CNBC, ABC, CNN, MSNBC, Fox, CosmoGirl, BusinessWeek and many more lapping up the story.

However, a source who spoke to Catherine recently told Mashable that it's more of a PR pitch: Catherine is a 4.0 honors student with little free time in between extra-curricular activities, he says, and knows little about the running of the site when questioned. While the teen angle is a great way to promote the site, the force behind it is older brother Geoff, almost 30, who learned that age is a good selling point while garnering press coverage for a startup in his freshman years. Now too old to play that card, his younger siblings have been thrust in front of the cameras, says our source. Your humble editor, now the grand old age of 21, will be hiring a 10 year old for marketing purposes.

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